Topic: Blinking HDD lights

[Adder]

Hi,

I have (2) 80GB IDE hard drives set up in RAID 1 on our e-Smith 5.5 server.

I am concerned that both drives activity LEDs are constantly on even when there is no-one accessing files off the server.

Is this normal for a RAID set up or is there something a little untoward going on here?

Thanks for the input.

[Drew]

Is this a brand new install of v5.5 w/RAID?  When you first reboot the SME machine with RAID the drives will take awhile to sync the data from one drive to the other (I think...correct me if I'm wrong guys.)

[Ray Mitchell]

Yes that's correct, with 2 x 80Gb in RAID1 it took about 6 hours to synchronise on sme 5.1.2
Regards
Ray Mitchell

[Adder]

I did enable UDMA on one drive but disabled it again given the fact that I am not sure what the second drive is refered to as (hda2..hdb1...??) and felt sure that SME wouldn't like having only one set to UDMA.

I am only new to Linux and am a little cautious about tweaks with hdparm given some of the warning I have read about trashing data.

Both drives are identical IBM units connected to an AOpen AK33 VIA MB which I understand may be a stumbling block for getting UDMA to work at it's best on.

Once the sync is finished, I take it that I can enable UDMA?